I’ve had trouble writing about these comics because there is so much packed into them: Fire Fang and all that yellow peril implies, which I’ve discussed a little here; Carr’s importance in Australian comics; and an artistic style so diverse that I checked twice that Carr was sole artist for both issues.

So I had two books and not much context beyond my own knowledge of Chinese yellow peril villains, 1970s adult comics like Heavy Metal and Vampirella (known colloquially in these parts as, “booby comics”), and a little Chinese history. But as I read, I noticed that the stories all bear the mark of Hammer Studios’ 1970s vampire films when Hammer shifted to the sexy end of the vampire spectrum and horror gave way to, continuing a trope: boobs, if boobs are a synecdoche for the eroticism/sexploitation of The Vampire Lovers (1970); Countess Dracula (1971); Dracula, AD 1972 (1972); and Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973). Unlike two of those films, the Vampire! stories are mostly period pieces set in the 1880s/90s or the1930s. But all the women’s breasts remind me of Hammer’s Horror Queen, Ingrid Pitt

For his part, Fire Fang is the total yellow peril package. He has the long nails, the Ming the Merciless collar, and if he were in color, he would be, as Jules Feiffer says, “the color of ripe lemons.”* Lemon yellow or no, he continues the tradition of villains such as Fu Manchu or Li H’sen Chang from the Doctor Who episode, “The Talons of Weng Chiang.” Mostly, Fire Fang is not so much a Chinese vampire as a Chinese vampire played by Christopher Lee. It’s not a stretch for Lee since he has played Fu Manchu.

In “The Exile of Fire Fang,”a “Mandarin of the Second Class” uses a beautiful concubine as bait to trap the vampire. The official tells the captive Fire Fang, “It is written by the Great Shih Chioo in the Ancient Chronicles of Ghouls and Devourers ‘that he who preserves the vampire’s supernatural life shall have the vampire’s services for two years.’” (1)

I like to think that there’s a book called, The Ancient Chronicles of Ghouls and Devourers, and that it contains instructions on building vampire traps.

As part of what is surely an inscrutably villainous scheme, Fire Fang is sent to Australia at the height of the Gold Rush with four “coolies” sworn to serve him. The men quickly tire of supplying Fire Fang with buxom white women and impale him with a pickaxe as he sleeps the sleep of the undead in an abandoned mine. The coolies then become bandits. Unfortunately, they’re caught pretty quick. So we never get their tale of derring-do, one in which they use racist stereotypes to throw the white devils off their trail.

In “Who Freed Fire Fang?” a young couple discover the crate containing the staked Fire Fang and foolishly remove the pickaxe waking Fire Fang, as others have foolishly woken Dracula, in the 1970s. According to Comics Down Under there’s one more uncollected story, “Fire Fang’s Circus.” I wonder how much it would recall “The Talons of Weng Chiang,” in which the villain is a stage magician reminding us that while we should be on the lookout for all Chinese men, we should also never trust traveling entertainers or circus folk.

But if villains like Fire Fang lead me to wonder, “What makes a white man look in the mirror and think, ‘Yes, I do have a faintly Oriental cast?” Dr. “Chinese” Patterson is the very man who thinks that. Patterson’s the protagonist of “The Brothers of Fire Fang,” in Vampire! #2. He plans “a walking Odyssey” from Shanghai to Rangoon and decides to pass, wearing Chinese clothing and “a pigtail pinned under his cap” to avoid the notice of “Chinese who hadn’t seen a white man before.” But while perfectly at home in China, Patterson never forgets who he is as he demonstrates while fighting bandits, shouting, “Advance Australia! And damn your kind!”

It’s okay to damn their kind, because Patterson is pals with Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, who he dismissively refers to as, “a local rebel.” Dr. Sun has arranged for a boatman to deliver Patterson to a village beset by the Brothers of Fire Fang: “Fang Cheng the Destroyer. He rode with Genghis Khan. In a far off country he was the first to be inflected….The deep breathing Lungki, the most chilling of the brothers. But known not to like European blood.” And, “Taka the Missionary Killer—bent on thwarting Christianity in China. His score of murders was high.”

Patterson has come to help a man named, Yun Chuwan. Frankly, I’m not sure why Yun needs help fighting vampires because he’s already hung three vampire heads from the town gates as a warning to others. Maybe on the other side of this Hammer horror story there’s a Cantonese hopping vampire one, like Mr. Vampire, and Patterson is the idiot who only makes things worse by not listening to Yun. But in Vampire!, Patterson gets right down to business—sleeping with Yun’s daughter Yee and explaining toYun that opium will not just be a blight, but a medical boon, establishing him as both Imperially virile and a visionary who foresees the Great War.

Like the Mandarin of the Second Degree before him, Patterson might also have been visionary enough to use Yee as bait. She slips out at night to bathe–at least I think that’s why she dips her breasts into a creek. After her bath, Yee is attacked by the three vampire brothers with such ferocity that she has no time to close her shirt. Patterson mans rockets he has already set up and waits for the vampires to cross the line of fire he has prepared. After dispatching the vampires, Patterson salaciously notes in a faux gentlemanly way that stayed he “longer than he planned” but left her, “a brave girl with the ashes of our adventure.”

Incidentally, the non-Fire Fang collected in these two comics stories feel pretty Hammer as well. In “The Unholy Relic,” a be-nightgowned woman** is menaced by a vampire, saved and attacked later by a bust of the very same vampire’s head. In “Home is the Specter, Home from the Haunt,” the double D starlets of Australia’s Mammoth Studios are set upon by a vampire during the filming of a Dracula knock-off starring the Bela Lugosian, Roberto Verio. Incidentally, that story has my favorite line of any in the comics: “I discovered long ago, a defence against a vampire’s great strength… Judo!”

3 Comments

I wish to explain and correct, The story The brothers of Fire Fang was inspired by the Australian adventurer Chinese Morrison. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Ernest_Morrison
Who became adviser to the first president of China, Dr Sun Yat-Sen. When he was confronted by a anti foreigner mob on his arrival in China he would exclaim Advance Australia!
This is a story set in the Ninetenth Century not in the PC Twentieth first Century. He proceeded by disguising himself as a Chinese. I grew up in Bendigo, a City created by the Great Australian Gold Rush, the Chinese dragon was an exciting part of my childhood. The body would swoop over our heads, trailing fire crackers and smoke, flashing mirrors to ward of evil spirits ! One of the local disappearance stories was of the police trooper who disappeared on his patrol of the Chinese camp in the eighteenth century. One of the Chinese descendants joked that the trooper was put in a crate and shipped back to China. I reversed that to a Chinese Vampire being shipped to Australia in a crate. If you Google images for Chinese Vampires, some are western creations some are Chinese. I wonder what the reaction would be if I came up with the hopping Vampire. Fire Fang had to be regal, a Chinese vampire that could match Dracula. Basically the medium is the message. Long live Loong! Fire Fang appeared on front and back covers of Fire Fang! He was not coloured yellow.

The Book!

We Have Mantis Fist Diagrams!

Gutter Business

Of Note Elsewhere

Dr. Nerdlove writes about The Punisher and Frank Castle’s broken masculinity. “Like the incredible Jessica Jones, Marvel’s ThePunisher examines and elevates a character and a genre defined by tropes and clichés. Despite being one in a long series of knock-offs of the Lone Vigilante genre – codified in its modern format by Death Wish and the Executioner novels – Netflix’s Marvel series takes a one-note anti-hero and becomes a surprisingly thoughtful examination of the damage that war and violence does to the people we expect to carry it out.”

Share:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

~

Gutter Co-founding Editor Jim Munroe writes about why he is moving on from No Media Kings: “I’ve decided to stop using the No Media Kings imprint for my work. I started using it back in 2000, and the media context has shifted drastically: things are so much weirder now. Who knew back then that the kind of print media consolidation I was concerned about would seem quaint in the face of Facebook’s billions of users? That the self-publishing game-changer would be a kinky e-book that came in 50 Shades of Grey? That Rupert Murdoch’s machiavellian publishing manoeuvres would pale in comparison to his overtly pro-Nazi mouthpiece, Fox News?”

Like this:

“(TONY) Hi, my name is Tony… (TAYLOR) and my name is Taylor… and this is the postmortem for Every Frame a Painting.

(TONY) As many of you have guessed, the channel more or less ended in September 2016 with the release of the “Marvel Symphonic Universe” video. For the last year, Taylor and I have tinkered behind-the-scenes to see if there was anything else we wanted to do with this YouTube channel.”

Share:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

~

Atlas Obscura looks at the world of the paintings made for display in hotel rooms and interview artist John Cerasulo. “’Dogs are huge, dogs wearing clothes always,’ Cerasulo says. Armed with the knowledge that people want to buy paintings of pups in sweaters, Cerasulo recently painted the ‘handsome boy’ shown above. He then scanned the painting, and sent it to a colleague who oversees a printing facility in China. There, the digital file was printed on canvas, and hand-accented with a translucent acrylic glaze to make the reproduction appear more like a painting than a print. Finally, the finished product was delivered to a showroom owner, who sells his work to businesses in need of art.”